"Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers on the judging panel."
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Quote collection
Seamus Heaney quotes (page 6 of 6)
113 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Smile As you find a rhythm Working you, slow mile by mile, Into your proper haunt."
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"I suppose I did feel a certain public pressure always."
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"Loyalism, or Unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland - it operates not as a class system, but a caste system."
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"Irish readers, British readers, American readers: is it odd that I haven't a clue about how differently they react? Or better say, I cannot find the words to describe my hunch about them."
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"I've nothing against the Queen personally: I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time."
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"My body was braille for the creeping influences."
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"Part of my gradual education of myself has been to think that there is a deep relationship between the nature of the creature and the worth of the art."
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"I shall gain glory or die."
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"Anything Can Happen is also, incidentally, a poem that arose from teaching. I'd talked about the Horace Ode (I, 34) [on which the poem is based] in a lecture I gave at Harvard in the fall of 2000 entitled Bright Boltsand remembered it after the Twin Towers attack."
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"I am not a playwright. A playwright would take "Antigone" and hit it a few clouts and knock it out of shape and restructure it. My versioning was strictly verbal."
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"The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage. The wet centre is bottomless."
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"If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness."
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